I called, called, and called again, reopening the case, only to have the disputes closed once more and the charges reposted to my account. Every time it happened, I called to refile the disputes.
And then there was a breakthrough.
Two weeks after Anna’s arraignment, I received a letter in the mail pertaining to my corporate card. “While pursuing your claim on the above referenced account from HOTEL LA MAMOUNIA MARRAKECH MOROCCO, we have maintained credit(s) of [$16,770.45] and advised you we would contact the merchant on your behalf.” I skipped ahead frantically, overeager for the verdict: “our previously issued credit(s) will remain on your account.”
I read the message five times before cautiously accepting that it might be good news. Then I took a photo of the letter and sent it to Kathryn and Nick to make sure they read it the same way.
I THINK this means that Amex has protected me from the charges on my corporate card!!!!!!!! I wrote.
Looks like it!!!!!!!! Kathryn responded.
I think it might . . . . . !!!! Nick agreed.
At first I read it as the other way around, I replied, but CREDIT was money issued back into my account. A charge would have been money taken out. Plus it’s not showing up in my account so that seems to be a good sign. Good grief.
I was scared to believe it but also too afraid to call American Express for clarification. (Could they change their mind?) But as time went on, my pessimism gave way to joyful acceptance, dampened only by the uncertain fate of the La Mamounia charge remaining on my personal card for $36,010.09, more than twice the amount forgiven on the corporate account. Considering Anna’s indictment and the decision on my corporate account, surely more good news would follow, right? I dared to think positive.
Given all of my progress, I had hoped that I would feel better during the ensuing winter months, but the truth is that I didn’t. I remained depressed and struggled with constant anxiety. The monochrome gray of Manhattan in winter only made it worse. I also lost my grandfather right before Christmas, the one who lived in Spartanburg, South Carolina. He was ninety-six, surrounded by loved ones, and by his own account “ready to go” when he died. But there will never come a day when I don’t miss him. I felt like I was always on the verge of tears and as if my breathing wasn’t doing what it was supposed to, my lungs never seeming to get full. Writing everything down helped, so I focused on that as much as I could.
On January 30, 2018, the day after my thirtieth birthday and two months after the good news about my corporate card, I was walking from the subway to work when I received a message regarding my personal card. “We are crediting your account for $36,010.09,” it read. “This credit will appear on an upcoming statement. We always aggressively pursue the arrest and prosecution of any individual(s) that have made unauthorized charges. If we need additional information from you we will contact you before 03/15/2018 or you may consider this case closed. . . . We regret any inconvenience you have experienced. Thank you for the opportunity to assist in this matter. Sincerely, Global Fraud Protection Services.”
I stood stock-still in the Condé Nast lobby and broke down crying with joy and relief. I took a screenshot of the message and immediately sent it to my parents, as well as to Kathryn and Nick.
I can’t believe it—I said to Nick—I feel like I can breathe properly again.
I texted the news to my closest friends. I don’t even have words for how relieved I am , I wrote. I’m scared to even believe it but it’s real. I fought hard. My claim was denied so many times. Cosmic that it happened today, my first full day of 30.
It was the end of the nightmare—or so I thought.
Without explanation, in early March, the charge reposted to my account. I hadn’t received a message of any kind. I had only logged in to the American Express website, and there it was. When I saw the balance, I started to shake. “I think there’s been a mistake,” I said on the phone. “I contested those charges, and the dispute was already resolved.”
The representative said there was nothing in the system to suggest the decision had been reversed. She saw only the same message I’d received back in January, saying I would be protected from the $36,010.09 hotel charge. Of course, I wanted so badly to trust that she was right, but it seemed too good to be true. So, at the end of the day, I called again, to see if anything had changed.
This time I received the news I’d been dreading. American Express had, indeed, backtracked—after contacting La Mamounia regarding my claim and once again receiving the signed preauthorization slip as evidence.
“But you’ve known about that slip the entire time,” I argued, insisting it had been signed under pressure and false pretenses. I had included clear mention of it in the written summary Amex had requested, describing the sequence of events surrounding my claim. “You knew about it when the decision was made in my favor, so why is it being brought up again now?”
The representative was sympathetic, but because there wasn’t any further explanation in the system, he had nothing else to tell me. My best course of action, he said, would be to contest the charge again. So that’s what I did. I reopened the dispute, and we started back at square one.
Unfortunately, the Amex reversal wasn’t the only significant event of March 2018. As I was boarding a flight to Los Angeles for the Vanity Fair Oscar party, I received a LinkedIn message from a reporter named Jessica Pressler, who was working on a piece about Anna Delvey for New York magazine and was interested in speaking with me.
I kicked myself for not realizing that my LinkedIn account could still receive incoming messages. I panicked, didn’t respond, and spent the next twenty-four hours wondering what to do. I had been writing about my Anna ordeal since the day after the Frying Pan intervention. To me, the narrative felt too long and complex to be shared in an article. But if it was going to happen, I decided, I wanted to tell my story myself, in my own words.
Vanity Fair published my article—a personal narrative, describing the making and breaking of my friendship with Anna—in April 2018, on the Hive section of its website. (The article subsequently appeared in the magazine’s summer print issue.) New York magazine published Jessica Pressler’s article, a comprehensive piece of investigative journalism, in late May.
I knew there was something about Anna that was catching, but I could not have anticipated just how big a media sensation she would become. My article was published on a Thursday, and almost immediately I was bombarded with a flood of messages asking about book, film, and television rights. On the following Tuesday, I received a message from an agent at CAA who had read my article and obtained my email address through a shared connection. At the time, I was feeling vulnerable, in over my head, and in need of wise counsel, so I gratefully accepted the agency’s offer to help me navigate territory that was dauntingly unfamiliar to me.
Not long after that, HBO optioned my article for a potential film or television adaptation, and Netflix optioned Pressler’s article for the same. Over the summer, people from around the world who had gone through similar experiences reached out to me. This reassured me that I had done the right thing by telling my story. And there was mutual comfort in knowing we were not alone. The support and encouragement I received from friends and strangers inspired me to keep on writing—especially since I knew there was a lot more to tell. So I spent most of the summer doing just that, writing down my story, while continuing my day job at Vanity Fair, which I still needed and very much loved.
Yet, there were bizarre consequences to the story’s success, too. Walking through Manhattan’s Greenwich Village in the fall of 2018, I saw a trendy-looking man in his mid-thirties, wearing a white T-shirt with the words “Fake German Heiress” on the front in black letters. I stopped dead in my tracks, staring in disbelief as I processed this strange twist in reality. It was as if I’d fallen into a dystopian TV thriller and might turn the next corner to discover a flash mob of strangers wearing Anna Delvey masks.
A quick Google search revealed
a range of Anna Delvey–inspired T-shirts for sale, one of which read, “My Other Shirt Will Wire You $30,000.” It bothered me to know that other people were laughing at something that had caused me such distress.
Still more people were clinging to Anna as an anti-Establishment hero. I understood the impulse to applaud someone who was taking advantage of the stereotypically self-important New York art scene, banks, and investment groups. But as a hardworking young woman from Knoxville, Tennessee, who had moved to the city with nothing but an entry-level job, it didn’t feel like this interpretation of Anna and her crimes was quite accurate. Rather, it seemed like people were seeing only what they wanted to see in Anna, instead of who she actually was: a fraudster whose narcissism was despicable and whose scheming was indiscriminate.
And yet, faceless social media users cried out, “Free Anna.” If Anna was the hero, where did that leave me?
* * *
I kept writing all through the winter. Even when it was hard, it felt cathartic and productive. Slowly but surely, everything that had come off the rails was getting back on track.
But then, in early January, I read in the New York Post that Anna had rejected an offer of three to nine years behind bars in exchange for a guilty plea. This was bizarre to me, considering that all of the evidence stacked up so heavily against her. (Swindling banks leaves a paper trail.) So I thought she would reconsider before her case actually went to trial.
Two weeks later, on a Thursday afternoon in January 2019, I was sitting with my headphones on in the Vanity Fair office listening to Nina Simone while organizing the files on my computer’s desktop when an email arrived in my in-box with the subject line “People v. Anna Sorokin.” It was from Assistant District Attorney McCaw. Anna’s trial had been scheduled, and I was likely to be called as a witness. I wasn’t braced for the news.
I immediately thought of having to see Anna in person, after so long, and the idea made me sick. When I walked through crowded places, I sometimes had the irrational fear that I would run into her, which always made me break into a cold sweat. I had no wish to ever see her again.
I tried to absorb what this meant, being asked to recount my experience in front of a roomful of strangers. Would there be press? Would I be able to find the right words? How would I keep from crying? No, there would be no chance of that. What if I passed out? Had that ever happened before?
And how would Anna look at me? Would she still think of me as a friend? I know the idea seems outlandish, but Anna had done exactly that, well past the point that most people in her position would have known our friendship was over. Why hadn’t she just accepted a plea deal? I imagined she was ten steps ahead. There must have been a reason. Did she want a trial for the notoriety? I’d learned that in addition to optioning Jessica Pressler’s article, Netflix had optioned Anna’s life rights. Was she going to trial simply for the drama? For the publicity? Had this been her plan all along?
On February 5, I was sitting at my desk at work when I received a phone call from an internal number and a name I didn’t recognize. I walked down the hallway to an office, as requested, and that’s when I learned that I was being laid off due to corporate restructuring. The news came as a blow, but I had been in publishing long enough to know that these things were often unpredictable. In recent years, there had been a lot of turnover at Condé Nast. Kathryn had left the magazine before me, almost one year to the day, along with fourteen other top staffers, who were laid off after Graydon Carter’s exit. In fact, I was one of the only ones left who had worked under Mr. Carter at Vanity Fair. I calmly packed up my belongings, without crying, until V.F.’s deputy editor called and graciously offered to connect me with some former colleagues of hers at other publications. Suddenly things felt very real. So when my desk was empty, Kathryn met me downstairs in her car to scoop me up—along with the office junk I’d accumulated over the previous eight and a half years—and we went out for a drink, toasting the bittersweet closing of a chapter.
Much of the next two months I spent dealing with everyday chores like switching my health insurance and cell phone plans and filing for an extension on my taxes. Nevertheless, the bulk of my time I devoted to writing. And I did a lot of writing. So much in my life had changed, and putting it into words helped me find meaning in the chaos and eased my anxieties.
Jury selection began on March 20, 2019. Initially, I tried to avoid reading about the trial in the news, but my friends and family sent me links to articles, and I couldn’t resist. In his opening statement, Anna’s lawyer, Todd Spodek, offered the jury a line from the song “New York, New York,” made famous by Frank Sinatra: If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere. “Because the opportunities in New York are endless,” Spodek suggested. “Sinatra made a great new start here in New York, as did Ms. Sorokin,” he said. “They both created a golden opportunity.”
A great new start? I thought. Assuming a false identity in order to cheat and steal?
“Anna had to kick down the door to get her chance at life,” Spodek continued. “Just like Sinatra had to do it his way, Anna had to do it her way.”
It felt to me like Spodek was sugarcoating Anna’s criminality—making it more palatable, not only to jurors but to the court of public opinion, and to the possible movie and TV-show audiences down the line. The crux of the defense was that “Anna had to fake it until she could make it,” which, to me, sounded like a clear admission of guilt. As in, Anna had to fake it (commit the crime) until she could make it (get away with it). Even Spodek had to admit that my former friend’s methods were “unorthodox” and “possibly unethical.”
“Through her sheer ingenuity, she created the life that she wanted for herself,” he argued. “Anna didn’t wait for opportunities, Anna created opportunities. Now, we can all relate to that. There’s a little bit of Anna in all of us.”
Speak for yourself, I thought. But then again, if you were a criminal defense lawyer and your client had committed crimes leaving evidence so damning that it couldn’t be denied—check fraud, for example—you would have to get creative, too. So I guess he was only doing his job.
The majority of the media coverage was focused on what Anna was wearing. This fascination had taken hold after she appeared in court wearing a black choker and a low-cut black Miu Miu dress. Photos of her courtroom outfits spread like wildfire across the Internet (under headlines such as W ’s ANNA DELVEY’S COURTROOM CHOKER LOOK IS SO ON-BRAND). GQ then published a story reporting that “Soho Grifter” Anna Sorokin had a fashion stylist, Anastasia Walker, dressing her for the trial. This sent social media users into a tizzy.
I felt like I was watching some kind of a dark social experiment through a one-sided mirror. According to the New York Post, Netflix had staffers attending the trial. I also understood that, in addition to being Anna’s criminal defense lawyer, Todd Spodek was representing his client in her entertainment dealings as well. So from the outside looking in—with press coverage and social media as intermediaries—it seemed to me that Anna was treating her own criminal proceedings as a business opportunity.
The press covered her every outfit and move. I scrutinized the photos of her, looking for any sign of guilt or remorse. It’s true that there were pictures of her crying, but only beneath headlines referring to “FASHION MELTDOWNS.” It was the same thing I’d witnessed at the Frying Pan, when she had said that she was crying because the New York Post had described her as a “wannabe socialite.” As far as I could tell, Anna’s emotions were more or less dependent on the way she appeared to the outside world.
When she seemed to like what she was wearing—according to Elle magazine, a plunging Michael Kors shift dress on one day, a sheer black Saint Laurent top with Victoria Beckham trousers on the next—she would walk brazenly into court, coyly smiling for the cameras, and turn around from the defendant’s table to take stock of the crowd and bask in the attention. But when Anna didn’t like what she was wearing, she put on a different show. According to the New Yor
k Post: “The haute ordeal began Friday morning when Sorokin, 28, arrived from Rikers Island in a tan prison-issue sweatsuit and refused to don the civilian outfit provided by authorities. An irritated [Judge] Kiesel sent her lawyer, Todd Spodek, into the holding cell to talk Sorokin into appearing. When the attorney came back, he said she was weeping and complaining of nausea. Sorokin told him that vindictive jail staffers were sabotaging her designer ensembles ‘to interfere with her being able to wear the clothes.’ ”
“Again, with all due respect to your client, she seems a bit inordinately concerned about her clothing,” New York State Supreme Court justice Diane Kiesel told Spodek, as reported in the Post. “This is a trial. She is a defendant in a criminal case. I am sorry if her clothing is not up to her standards, but she’s got to be here.”
To me, however, the press missed the bigger question: Where was Anna getting the money to fund her criminal defense, wardrobe included? Who was paying for her stylist (who, according to Elle, was “hesitant to reveal the exact details of her arrangement with Sorokin” but did disclose that she was “getting paid for the gig” and that she and Anna would “continue working together in the future”)? Was Netflix funding any of this? Legally, Anna is not allowed to profit from her crimes. But Netflix can. I wondered what loopholes there might be in the law that would allow Netflix to act in their interest, and Anna’s, by spending money to amplify and elevate Anna’s case, as an investment in Anna Delvey, the phenomenon.
Or did Anna have some unknown benefactor who stepped in to finance her lawyer and stylist? Leading up to my testimony, these are the questions that occupied a certain space in my brain.
A few days before I was scheduled to testify, I discovered an article about Anna on the website of Komsomolskaya Pravda, a daily newspaper published in Russia. Anna’s birth name was Anna Vadimovna Sorokina, it said. She was born in Domodedovo, a town twenty-one miles south of Moscow. Her father had worked as a truck driver, and more recently selling air conditioners. Her mother had once owned a store, but after the birth of Anna’s younger brother, she had become a housewife. (So Anna does have a younger brother, I thought to myself, wondering if he really played chess.) Anna’s family left Russia for Germany in 2007, when she was sixteen, and moved to a small town called Eschweiler, thirty miles west of Cologne.
My Friend Anna Page 26